


windsong

by themorninglark



Category: Free!
Genre: Free! Starting Days, Graduation and beyond, M/M, Post-Canon, long distance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:30:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7772050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>"I'll be waiting for you," and <em>this</em> time, it's a low hum layered on like a confession, way overdue. <em>So</em>, thinks Nao, tenderly amused. This is Kirishima Natsuya's brand of love poetry.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	windsong

**Author's Note:**

> Just a small, atmospheric thing to help fill up this shockingly empty tag. I can't believe there aren't more fics for these two. Have you _seen_ them?!

 

 

The first time they kiss, it's the day before graduation and Natsuya's lips are chapped.

They're _always_ chapped, like this, in the open air, like they thirst to touch the water or _something else_ ; and there's always something of chlorine that lingers in his exhale, the breath that binds them, divides them, as Nao dips his head down because it's Natsuya who's sitting on the grass beneath the oak tree in the schoolyard, and it's Natsuya who reaches out beyond the canopy to invite Nao into the shade.

Nao can only hear the rustle of leaves overhead, the distant cry of gulls, heading seaward, _heading home_. Like the tide washing in to shore at last, a thought blossoms: _well, finally_.

Natsuya, he knows, is probably not thinking at all. He has a hand on Nao's collar, and he's raising it to thread his fingers through his hair, push the silver-grey strands out of his eyes. _The better to see each other with._ Not that they need a reminder, either of them; Nao wears the sight of Natsuya on his sleeve, and then he forgets everything about the body's _centre of gravity_ as he falls forward, steadies himself into Natsuya's hand on the small of his back.

Natsuya's pulse keeps time for them. _Their_ time. It is _now_ , it is the drifting breath when the _sakura_ petals start to fall and tomorrow comes, and tomorrow after that. It is the tick of another clock that measures their strokes by the milliseconds, and it is interminable afternoons spent studying in libraries, their elbows bumping, staying where they are as Nao works out a tricky math problem for Natsuya. It is years and years and an echo that murmurs like memory as his wrist brushes the shell of Nao's ear. It's a rhythm Nao knows by heart.

He sees the sparks dance over his retinas again. This time, the self-diagnosis holds; _the cause_ , this touch he's learned so well, spilling its secrets like it simply cannot wait any more.

He wishes that his palms were not sweating, but then Natsuya's are, too, and they've seen each other at far worse moments.

He wishes that he had not just had a carton of milk over lunch, because _milk_ and _chlorine_ together would not make for a pleasant combination, and he lets his gaze linger, speculative, on the chiselled lines of Natsuya's jaw, the hollow of his throat where a butterfly kiss might leave a mark to be remembered, but then Natsuya's nose is bumping his and Natsuya's eyes are a summer's study in sunlit amber and Natsuya's finally, _finally_ —

 _Nao,_ he breathes.

Nao shudders, feels the tremor run through his body and take him, liberate him.

It is he who leans in first.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Natsuya's lips map the outline of his own gentle ones, find their way down the dip of Nao's neck, and that is where they leave it.

That is where they leave it, at least for now, when they collect their diplomas the next day and twine their fingers tight behind the hall, and Natsuya turns to Nao with a smile like all the lights in Tokyo. Electric, romantic, dreamlike.

"I'm really happy I kissed you," he says.

Nao laughs. "How direct."

He lets a tone of admonition creep into his voice. Natsuya rubs the back of his neck, a penitent gesture, and his grin only brightens, impossibly. _How direct_ , the flame; how it has burned for years. Here they are now, beginning to melt. Tomorrow, they will have to find themselves again, and Nao holds this to be sacred: they will not settle for being mere _missing pieces_ of each other. They've come too far for that.

They will be whole, and they are _who they are_ , only stronger.

" _Ahh,_ you know me. I'm a direct kind of guy, right?"

"Took you long enough to kiss me then," Nao's quick to point out.

"Ha." Natsuya laughs again. "Fine. You got me."

Nao's smile is the gold of wheat-fields, a radiant silhouette against the season's sky. "I always get you."

"Shut up," says Natsuya, and presses another kiss to Nao's temple as he slings an arm round his shoulders.

Behind them, the graduation songs, the shouts and the cameras clicking make a strange melody that scores _nostalgia_ into Nao's mind, sentiment that ripples inwards rather than out. The familiarity of the present sits at the centre of it all. Here, on school grounds, Natsuya's arm draped carelessly like this in its natural place, a place it's found so effortlessly so many times before.

This time, thinks Nao, there's something subtly different about it: _stripped down,_ laid bare at last, Natsuya holds him like he might be the _wind itself_ , as ready to float away on a gentle whim as to simply _take off_ , a fierce zephyr, Iwatobi and Natsuya mere gleaming memories in his wake. Through their seasons past and seasons yet to come, Natsuya's always known, after all — said, in another time, another place —

"I'll be waiting for you," and _this_ time, it's a low hum layered on like a confession, way overdue. _So_ , thinks Nao, tenderly amused. This is Kirishima Natsuya's brand of love poetry. It is moving, in its own _Natsuya_ way.

Natsuya knows a thing or two about waiting.

In a classroom one day, he'd said, _it's always the quiet ones,_ full of faux-grumbles about Ikuya and his sudden burst of _monstrous speed_ one day and how close he had come to losing an impromptu race, and Nao had looked at him from the corner of one twinkling eye and said nothing, for he had no consolation to offer and Natsuya didn't need it.

He had settled more closely into his perch on the edge of Natsuya's desk instead, laid a hand on his arm and said, _I know_.

_Yeah. You would, eh?_

_Mmm, well._

Natsuya's arm tightens round Nao, and Nao takes a moment to learn the shape of it again. To realise that from the pool to the hospital to _here_ , Natsuya has never held him like he's glass. He's been rough, he's been awkward and gangly and _eager_ at turns and he's swept Nao right off his feet, and if anyone had known they might have told him to _be careful_ , but Nao is no fragile child and all of his invisible scars are his strength.

Natsuya knows that, too.

The speckled light overhead starts to fade. Nao shields his eyes, blinks up into the beckoning sun, and Natsuya reaches over to pluck his phone from his front pocket.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_"Hey, Nao, let's take a picture!"_

_"And why are we using my phone when you have a perfectly good one of your own?"_

_"So that I can set it as your wallpaper, because I know you wouldn't. You'd be all, like, I don't want to see my own face all the time — like it isn't a really nice face — "_

_"You do know I can change wallpaper any time, don't you?"_

_"Yeah, but you won't."_

 

 

(Nao won't.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

In Tokyo, Nao finds an indoor swimming pool that he likes. It's something of a trek from his apartment.

He is, in Natsuya's words, _fussy as hell_ ; he is, in his own words, _patient_. He's too well-versed in theory to let things like chlorine balance and water quality slide, not to mention the lighting, the feel of the tiles beneath bare feet, the grip on the starting blocks, everything that he's stored up and shored up over the months turned years out of the pool, always, always, by Natsuya's side with a clipboard and stopwatch.

He may not have all of Natsuya's medals, but he knows could claim a part of them as his own anyway, and Natsuya would give them up willingly. A quarter. A half. A whole, shared.

 _This is the place!_ he sends Natsuya in a text with a photo attached.

Natsuya's answer comes so swiftly that Nao knows he must be in a lecture at that very moment.

_Looks like any old pool._

_It's the best one in Tokyo. Pay attention in class._

_It's boring!!! You're not here to tutor me :(_

_:) <3_

There's a pause then, a long enough lapse between messages to make Nao look down at their conversation and wonder, as his bus trundles through the suburbs, past schools and _oden_ stalls and bicycle racks, if Natsuya's actually fallen asleep. It wouldn't be the first time.

As he gets off at his stop, he feels his phone buzz in his hand again.

_urgh, it really is boring. But I tried. I'm trying._

_You're a champ,_ Nao texts back, and he's only half-joking.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Rain comes and goes in the beginning of July. So does Natsuya, clad in a waterproof windbreaker because he does not believe in umbrellas, and _besides, it's just water!_

Nao brings a ridiculous oversized umbrella, big enough to shelter both of them on the short walk from the station to his place, and smiles sweetly when Natsuya surrenders with minimal protest.

"How's Ikuya doing?" he asks.

Natsuya beams. "I watched him swim in a friendly the other day. He placed first by 0.75 seconds in the 400m breaststroke."

"Really? That's huge," says Nao, impressed.

"Isn't it?"

Nao tilts his head in recollection, a memory of clear, precise strokes surfacing in his mind. It's surprising how easily it all comes back to him. Junior high feels like an age ago. But then again, some things never quite fade into that horizon of watery blue, and Nao remembers all the swimmers he has trained, this one better than most; for he is close to Natsuya's heart, and so, too, to his.

"Ikuya's suited to long distance racing. He's always been an efficient swimmer."

"It was you who noticed that first. You were there for him," Natsuya murmurs, generous.

Nao shakes his head.

"No," he says, and in his quiet, he is emphatic. "It was you who counted on me."

They stop by the neighbourhood 7-11 then to pick up _bento_ , because Nao hasn't had time to cook dinner; he's come straight from the pool, his hair still slightly damp and sticking to his face. Natsuya steals a moment under the green-and-white striped awning to brush the strands off with his thumb.

"You've let your hair grow out, huh? You never told me."

Nao smiles. "I wanted to save something as a surprise. Do you like it?"

"I love it. But _as if_ that'd matter to you. You'd just do as you like," says Natsuya, with a warm, knowing chuckle, and Nao laughs too, shuts the umbrella and shakes off the raindrops.

They make a glistening spray in the air, like victory at the end of a lap. _Till the next swim. Together, maybe. Tomorrow._

He breathes it in: the smell of the passing spring shower on the pavement, the tangible reality of Natsuya's touch, Natsuya's knuckles lingering on his cheek, these few seconds; _0.75s_ can make all the difference. So can a body's angles, and the arch of a foot.

Nao does not tiptoe, not _quite_ , but he _listens_ to Natsuya's steady pulse, and slides right in where there's space for him. _There_ , between his fingers, like the rain, _there_ , between the hushed, unspoken syllables of his name, a name that Natsuya utters like his body's breath. Like a sigh, at long last satisfied.

This time, Natsuya kisses him first, and Natsuya has never kissed him like he's glass.

His lips are still chapped. _Thirsting._

Nao catches his breath at the back of his throat. Catches the summer wind, hot and damp and a searing song on his skin, and reaches up to embrace the sun. It is _here, here,_ and has always been.

 

 


End file.
